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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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Paul Schrader’s classic essay “Notes onFilm Noir” (1972) (included in
Alain Silver and James Ursini’s excellent Film Noir Reader [Limelight,
1996]) cataloged the dark American crime films of the 1940s and 1950s into
three phases. In the “wartime period” (roughly 1941­–1946), the reigning style
appeared in movies like The Maltese Falcon, with its glossy look, chatty
private eye, and stagey contrivances. In phase two (approximately 1945–1949),
crime films emerged from the war grittier and more disillusioned, their focus
shifting toward street crime, corruption, and police procedurals (Force of
Evil, The Naked City). Bogart’s flash and polish gave way to Fred
MacMurray’s easy, sleazy amorality in Double Indemnity, a pivotal film
which shed the studio look and detective hero in favor of brazen criminality
and seething sexuality. And the third phase—Schrader’s pick for the “cream of
the film noir period”—is defined by “psychotic action and suicidal
impulse,” as in James Cagney’s outrageously brutal leading role in Kiss
Tomorrow Goodbye or Ralph Meeker’s hunky, thuggish Mike Hammer in Kiss
Me Deadly.

Drive,
the first US production of Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, is deeply
indebted to the noir tradition, particularly to that vital third phase.
Though the first half of the film keeps everything tense and low-key, it
springs into psychotic action during the second half. The main character played
by Ryan Gosling is credited as “The Driver,” though he is largely nameless in
the film, known only by his white jacket with a scorpion on the back. Crucial
to the storyline is the fable about a frog who reluctantly gives a scorpion a
ride on his back across a river. The scorpion convinces the frog that stinging
his ride would be foolish since they would both drown. The frog relents and is
shocked when the scorpion zaps him anyway. The only explanation the scorpion
can give is that he did what was in his nature. This fable is partly retold by
Gosling near the end of the film, and it functions as a key not only to Drive,
but to most of the classic noir films—everything falls apart when our
irrepressible, base natures cause us to act out against our better selves.

The
heart of this film is a compassionate look at several nontraditional family
arrangements. Ryan Gosling’s unnamed character, who carries himself with an odd
blend of sheepishness and stoicism, falls in love with his next door neighbor
Irene (Carey Mulligan), a woman caring for her son while her husband awaits
release from prison. In his work life, the Driver is a mechanic, a movie
stuntman, a potential racer, and a criminal getaway expert. All of these jobs
are managed for him by Shannon (Bryan Cranston), a grizzled, tattooed body-shop
owner who is as close to a father as anyone for the Driver. Shannon tries to
create a stock-car racing team with financial backing from Bernie (Albert
Brooks), a low-level racketeer who works with Nino (Ron Perlman), a crime boss
who seems to be only one rung above Bernie on the criminal ladder. Both of
these gangsters are vicious and not above bloodying their own hands, but there
is a sweetness and sorrow in their relations with each other, especially as
they discuss their identity as Jewish men who will never be respected by their
Italian mob superiors. The criminal group and Irene’s husband have some
surprising connections which add wrinkles to the plot, but for much of the film
the Driver acts as a surrogate son, husband, or father to the other orphans of
the story.

Refn’s
previous film, Valhalla Rising (2009), was a trippy, bloody adventure
story about a one-eyed Viking who joins medieval Christian warriors sailing off
to fight in the Crusades. Their journey is waylaid, and they all end up
massacred in a ­hinterland they presume is hell. The Los Angeles of Drive
has something of this hellish quality, and the coincidences that springload the
plot as it launches into violent chaos bear traces of the inescapable,
fatalistic punishment of classic films noir. In a memorable sequence
from Valhalla Rising, the warriors languish aboard a mist-veiled ship on
a motionless sea. This sequence, blatantly swiped from Coleridge’s Rime of
the Ancient Mariner, maximizes the horrors of exhaustion in the absence of
God—or perhaps God’s disfavor with men on a vengeance quest in His name. Prayer
fails, as does fighting, cursing, and a whole host of attempts to grapple with
their Job-like predicament. Drive lifts something of this theme as the
various criminal bosses and lackeys blame each other for the collapse of their
syndicate.

The
despairing, pessimistic tone of noir cinema has often been seen as a
direct relative of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy. The universes
created by movies like Kiss Me Deadly and Double Indemnity seem
to lack any inherent meaning. The brutish, loner males and alluring, deadly
females who populate these films thrive on the power of their amoral choices.
And yet, there often seems to be cosmic retribution as the plot unravels along
with the protagonist’s schemes. One of my colleagues in the history department
at Whitworth University says that film noir is the most Christian of
film genres because no other genre takes as seriously the presence and effects
of sin. In Drive as in Valhalla Rising, the sinfulness of the
characters is matched only by their despair and loss.

Refn
won a Best Director Award for Drive at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival,
and it is not hard to see why given the ways the film calls attention to its
directorial vision. It is a stylish, neo-noir mash-up of classic Hollywood,
1980s action movies and 1970s exploitation cinema. The opening sequence is an
especially tense getaway through the labyrinth of Los Angeles, all shot in
lighting that obscures much of the Driver’s face. Part of what makes its style
so compelling is how Refn splashes violence into a slow, meditative, serene
context. Valhalla Rising offers this same contrast, but the scarred,
Scandinavian barbarian at its center bristles with violence while Gosling’s
Driver is calm and precise, wearing a white jacket and cool expression. Refn’s
film Bronson (2008) was also full of gory shocker scenes, but their
overall effect was less jarring due to the garrulousness of the title
character—a bare-knuckle boxer who became England’s most lethal inmate and a
vigorous self-promoter. Like many of the post-Tarantino generation of
filmmakers working with crime genres, Refn’s film exudes cinephilia and an
appetite for gruesome shocks. Where Refn differs from directors like Guy
Ritchie (Snatch, RocknRolla) is in his capacity for fluid storytelling
and emphasis on characters with emotional depth.

Refn’s
finest work may still be his Pusher Trilogy in which he uses his genuine
compassion for nasty underworld characters to humanize them. The three films—Pusher
(1996), Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands (2004), and Pusher III: I’m
the Angel of Death (2005)—are set in Copenhagen’s underworld, and in each,
the protagonist’s way is troubled by another character’s villainy and/or
stupidity (much like Drive). The trilogy as a whole is engrossing because
in each successive film, the villain from the previous one becomes the central
character. By the end of the third installment, we understand how the motives
of even the most depraved characters are actually rich with nuance and
complexity.

Though
Drive does not stir quite this same level of sympathy for its
characters, Refn still manages to imbue his vicious criminals with humanity.
The Driver, despite being a tabula rasa, has a kindly melancholy, not
only around his love interest but also with Bernie in their final
confrontation. Bernie, even as he slices his enemies with razors, displays a
weariness with killing and wistfulness for the better life he cannot find. Most
intriguingly for the noir genre, the stock femme fatale character
seems to be split across two women—Irene, who (inadvertently) lures the Driver
into the scheme that will undo him, and Blanche (played by Christina
Hendricks), who unleashes the torrent of violence that propels the latter half
of the film. In both cases, Refn enlists our sympathies by showing the
hopelessness of these women’s situations and their yearning for better lives
that they cannot have. Though the City of Angels may be for these characters a
living hell, Refn manages to make us care even about the scorpions.

Charles
Andrews is
Associate Professor of English at Whitworth University.